Dossier 20: The Perils of Pluralism

There are few beliefs more entrenched in the
modern liberal imagination than that of the virtues of pluralism and a
multicultural society. The degree to which Sarajevo has assumed symbolic
significance expresses the measure of attachment to the principles of a
multicultural, multiethnic community. Just as in the thirties the struggle for
Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War became symbolic of the defence of
democracy against fascism, so the siege of Sarajevo has assumed a mythic status
as a struggle between pluralism and barbarism. On the other hand there are few
crimes which contemporary society regards as more monstrous than that of ‘ethnic
cleansing’, the attempt to eliminate diversity and difference and to create an
ethnically and culturally homogenous society. From Bosnia to Rwanda the forcible
expulsion of rival ethnic groups has become the measure of the breakdown of
civilised values.

Belief in pluralism and the multicultural society is so
much woven into the fabric of our lives that we rarely stand back to question
some of its assumptions. They are seen as self-evidently good. As the American
academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer puts it in the title of
a new book, We are All Multiculturalists Now. The celebration of difference, the
promotion of a diverse society, tolerance for a variety of cultural identities -
these are seen by almost everyone as the hallmarks of a decent, liberal,
democratic, non-racist society.

I want in this essay to question this
easy assumption that pluralism is self-evidently good. I want to show, rather,
that the notion of pluralism is a deeply ambiguous one; that the idea of
difference has always been at the heart, not of the antiracist, but of the
racist agenda; and that the creation of a multiculturalist’ society has been at
the expense of a more equal one.

Even a superficial look at the idea of
pluralism reveals how ambiguous a notion it is. Sarajevo may be a symbol of
multiculturalism; but it was the assertion of ‘difference’ that originally led
to the break-up of the Yugoslav federation and to a savage civil war. The far
right in France has long adroitly exploited the idea of cultural difference to
argue against the possibility of Muslims becoming French. The Council of
Europe’s campaign against racism and xenophobia has adopted a slogan - ‘All
equal, all different’ - that a generation ago was the battle cry of
segregationists in the American south and of apologists for apartheid in South
Africa.

If such examples reveal the difficulty in drawing a line between
respect for difference and contempt for the Other, then the US philosopher
Richard Rorty suggests that advocacy of pluralism may be inimical to the pursuit
of equality. Pluralism, he observes, places what he calls ‘Enlightenment
liberals’ in a terrible dilemma:

Their liberalism forces them to call any
doubts about human equality a result of irrational bias. Yet their
connoisseurship [of pluralism] forces them to realise that most of the globe’s
inhabitants do not believe in equality, that such a belief is a western
eccentricity. Since they think it would be shockingly ethnocentric to say ‘So
what? We western liberals do believe in it and so much the better for us’, they
are stuck.

Rorty himself solves the dilemma by arguing that equality is
good for ‘us’ but not necessarily for ‘them’. This is in line with the argument
of many liberals today who want to redefine equality to fit in with a more
pluralistic world. But when respect for others means a refusal to judge others’
values or norms, when backward habits, reactionary institutions and illogical
beliefs are defended on the grounds that they may not make much sense in our
culture but they do in others’, then the pursuit of difference has turned into
indifference, into a callous disregard for the fate of others on the grounds
that they are ‘not like us’. Rorty is right to suggest that pluralism and
equality make conflicting demands on society. The answer, however, is not to
abandon our commitment to equality but to rethink what we mean by
pluralism.

The promotion of ‘difference’, far from being an antiracist
principle, has from the start been at the heart of the racial agenda. Ever since
the Enlightenment, western thinkers and policy makers have wrestled with the
contradiction of societies that express a deep-seated belief in, and respect
for, equality and yet are themselves profoundly unequal. Out of this
contradiction the ideology of race developed. Racial theory attempted to explain
the gulf between an abstract attachment to equality and the reality of social
inequality by suggesting that inequality itself was naturally given. Society was
unequal because the destiny of every social group was in some way linked to
intrinsic qualities that each possessed. For racial theorists the nature of a
society was explained by the differences it embodied.

In the nineteenth
century, group differences were seen largely as biological in nature - as in the
ideology of scientific racism. Today those differences are more often than not
seen as cultural. The horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust helped discredit
racial science and biological theories of human differences. But if, in the
post-war world, racial science was buried, racial thinking was not. The
biological arguments for racial superiority were thrown into disrepute and overt
expressions of racism were discredited. All the assumptions of racial thinking,
however, were maintained intact - in particular the belief that humanity can be
divided into discrete groups; that each group should be considered in its own
terms; that each is in some way incommensurate with the others; and that the
important relationships in society arise not out of commonalties but out of the
differences between groups. The form of racial thinking, however, changed. It
was cast not in biological terms but in the language of cultural pluralism. At
the policy level this led to the pursuit of ‘multiculturalism’ as a desirable
social goal.

The concept of a multicultural society developed in the
post-war world largely in response to the impact of mass immigration into
western societies. Eleven million workers came to Europe in the 1950s and 1960s,
encouraged by an economic boom. In the USA a different kind of mass migration
took place - the huge movement of African Americans to the northern cities in
the fifties and sixties. In both cases the newcomers found themselves on the
margins of society, subject to racism and discrimination, and unable to gain
access to levers of power. The ideology of multiculturalism developed as an
accommodation to the persistence of inequalities despite the rhetoric of
integration, assimilation and equality.

In the United States of the
1960s, for instance, most commentators, both black and white, hoped and expected
that African American migrants to the north would eventually integrate into US
society, as fully as had European immigrants. The title of a 1966 article by
Irving Kristol in the New York Times captured that hope: ‘The Negro Today is
like the Immigrant Yesterday.’ Three decades later we can see how sadly
misplaced were such claims. Virtually every social statistic - from housing
segregation to rates of intermarriage, from infant mortality rates to language
use - shows that African Americans live very different lives to the rest of
America. The experience even of Hispanic Americans is far closer to that of
American whites than it is to that of African Americans.

The failure of
the movement for equality has led to the celebration of difference. The black
American critic Bell Hooks observes that ‘civil rights reform reinforced the
idea that black liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people
gained equal access to material opportunities and privileges to whites - jobs,
housing, schooling etc.’ This strategy could never bring about liberation,
argues Hooks, because such ‘ideas of “freedom” were informed by efforts to
imitate the behaviour, lifestyles and most importantly the values and
consciousness of white colonisers’. The failure of equality has led radical
critics like Hooks to declare that equality itself is problematic because
African Americans are ‘different’ from whites.

Politicians and
policy-makers have responded to such arguments by reinventing the United States
as a ‘multicultural’ nation. Multiculturalism is premised on the idea that it is
a nation composed of many different cultural groups and peoples. But in reality
it is the product of the continued exclusion of one group: African Americans.
The promotion of multiculturalism is a tacit admission that the barriers that
separate blacks and whites cannot be breached and that equality has been
abandoned as a social policy goal. ‘Multiculturalism’, Nathan Glazer has
written, ‘is the price America is paying for the inability or unwillingness to
incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same
degree it has incorporated so many other groups.’ The real price, however, is
being paid by African Americans themselves. For in truth America is not
multicultural; it is simply unequal. And the promotion of multiculturalism is an
acknowledgement of the inevitability of that inequality.

The ‘apartness’
of black and immigrant communities in western Europe is probably not so great as
that of African Americas in the USA. Nevertheless, here too pluralism has become
a means to avoid debate about the failure of equality. As black communities have
remained excluded from mainstream society, subject to discrimination and often
clinging to old habits and lifestyles as a familiar anchor in a hostile world,
so such differences have become rationalised not as the negative product of
racism but as the positive result of pluralism.

Many young people in
Marseilles or East London call themselves Muslim, for instance, less because of
religious faith or cultural habits, than because in the face of a hostile,
anti-Muslim society, calling oneself Muslim is a way of defending the dignity of
one’s community. Their Islam is not the free celebration of an identity, but an
attempt to negotiate a difficult relationship with a hostile society as best
they can. Muslims in London or Paris no more choose their ‘difference’ than
African American youth do in the Bronx or South Central LA - or indeed Jews did
in Nazi Germany. As one Muslim activist from Bradford put it, ‘Our Islam is
constructed by the strength of anti-Muslim hysteria in this country.’ In
describing such fractured societies as ‘multicultural’ we are in danger of
celebrating the differences that are imposed by a racist society.

It is
useful to compare the experience of post-war immigrants - and of African
American migrants to northern cities in the USA - with earlier waves of
immigration into Europe and America. Between the 1890s and the 1920s there was a
large influx of east Europeans into Britain, of Italians and Portuguese into
France, and of east and south Europeans into the USA. These newcomers were often
met with the same hostility as greeted post-war black immigrants. They too were
condemned as alien, as less intelligent, as immoral and promiscuous, as given to
violence, drugs and drink.

Yet they eventually became integrated into the
host nations, and unlike today no one regarded their presence as presaging the
creation of a ‘multicultural’ society. The contrast between the experience of
pre-war and post-war immigration lies less with the immigrants themselves than
with the host societies. Three major changes in society have made the pursuit of
integration and equality that much more difficult. First, the material capacity
of society to provide equality has been eroded. The recessions that have hit
western economies since the 1970s has helped entrench the marginalisation of
black immigrants and of African American migrants.

Second, the idea of a
common culture has weakened. The break-up of the post-war consensus and the end
of the Cold War has created a fragile and anxious mood, in which the idea of a
coherent national identity has become problematic. Particularly in the USA, the
Cold War provided a common external enemy and a sense of mission around which to
articulate what it meant to be American. The loss of that has sapped the belief
in a common culture to which all belong.

Third, and perhaps most
importantly, the notion of equality itself has been transformed. The inability
of struggles such as the civil rights movements in the USA to transform the
lives of the majority of African Americans has sapped the morale of
anti-racists. Campaigning for equality means challenging accepted practices,
being willing to march against the grain, to believe in the possibility of
social transformation. Conversely, celebrating differences between peoples
allows us to accept society as it is - all it says is ‘we live in a diverse
world, enjoy it’. It allows us to accept the divisions and inequalities that
characterise the world today.

The social changes that have swept the
world over the past decade have intensified this sense of pessimism. The end of
the Cold War, the collapse of the left, the crumbling of the post-war order and
the fragmentation of social movements have shattered many of the certainties of
the past. In particular they have thrown into doubt our capacity to change the
world for the better. In this context the quest for equality has largely been
abandoned in favour of the claim to a diverse society. The idea of
multiculturalism, like that of race, is an attempt to come to terms with
inequalities in a society that professes belief in equality. Whereas racial
theorists used to say that social differences were the inevitable product of
natural differences and there is nothing we could do about it, multiculturalists
argue that they are the product of cultural differences and there is nothing we
should do about it. But this is simply to rename inequality.

Equality is
not a ‘western eccentricity’. It refers to our universal capacity to act as
political equals. In an equal society, that capacity can take a myriad of forms,
and hence can become the basis of true difference. Indeed, only in an equal
society can difference have any meaning, because it is only here that difference
can be freely chosen. In an unequal society, however, the pursuit of difference
all too often means the entrenchment of already existing inequalities.
Inequalities simply become reframed through the discourse of ‘difference’. The
challenge today is not to embrace ‘difference’ as a political goal but to
transcend the whole language of race and to put the case clearly for
equality.

Acknowledgements: This article was first published in ‘The
Future’, the anniversary issue of Index on Censorship, No. 3/97, May 1997, and
is reprinted with the permission of the editors.